“Dr. Lupesky will see you now. Please step this way…”
Only my idol Joe Ziemba could be so eloquent as to declare Soultangler was “RE-ANIMATOR but shot on Long Island for the price of a used car.” Re-Animator is without a doubt the first thing that comes to mind while watching a film about a disavowed crack scientist who reanimates corpses. That scientist is Anton Lupesky, and his drug, Anphorium, allows him to do precisely that.
It allows the user’s soul to leave its body and reanimate any corpse, provided it has eyes (they are the windows to the soul, after all). Dr. Lupesky is on a tear to find another being that can withstand the drug’s extreme hallucinatory side-effects, so he kidnaps people. One reporter is on the hunt for answers regarding the disappearances, and finds herself TANGLED in Lupesky’s web.
Soultangler tries terribly hard to be compelling, and that’s its charm. It’s a movie made out of genuine passion. The entire budget is dumped into the final fifteen minutes, where the story cuts loose and the blood flows like… something that flows a lot. A river…something. There’s lots of blood! Getting there is a bit of labor, but once you make it you’re rewarded with plenty of eye-gouging, meat-cleaving, brain-snailing trash candy.
This is the sixth release from the American Genre Film Archive (AGFA), and it brings all the weird splatter we expect in genre films, cleans it up to a nice polish, and packages it in a slick DVD with a commentary track, behind-the-scenes footage, and hell, even a music video (because why not!?). AGFA’s new slogan should be AGFA – Doing the lord’s unsavory work since two-thousand seventeen.
I recommend Soultangler to anyone who wears a denim vest with patches and pins all over it, anyone who wants to rinse the stench of Easter from their body, or to anyone who likes the fresh smell of viscera in the morning.
7/10
Stay Slime, and be Rad at all times!
-Rat
Spook du jour 